


Ember and Serenity

by luninosity



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, First Kiss, First Meetings, Librarians, M/M, Magic, Rating May Change, Romance, Unconventional Families, thieves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-18 02:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10607388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: Emberly Lyon, reshelving the third volume of Gruyere’sHistory of Empire,startled a book-thief in the back room of the King’s library at half-past three in the morning.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You all said you might be interested, so, um, here? This is chapter one; chapter two needs a bit of polishing. I THINK there are six chapters, but I've been wrong before. The rating will get to Mature around chapter three or four, I think...
> 
> Um, hi, have some...original fic? *hides in shyness attack* We'll see how this goes. I'm thinking I'll maybe put up the two original fics-in-progress, for motivation/support/making myself finish them?

Emberly Lyon, reshelving the third volume of Gruyere’s _History of Empire_ , startled a book-thief in the back room of the King’s library at half-past three in the morning.

Ember, one hand still clutching leatherbound pages, blinked at the intruder in lantern-light. The book-thief recovered from surprise first, and demanded, “What are you even _doing_ here?”

“I was—” Instinctive guilt—he’d always been capable of losing time in a book, about which Chance teased him mercilessly, in the way of younger brothers—lost out to baffled anger. “I’m the King’s librarian! What are _you_ doing?”

“I don’t suppose you’d believe I wanted to borrow a novel of seafaring navigation, shipwreck, and improbable feats of adventure?” The book-thief had a voice that laughed: wind over water, copper chimes in arched doorways, melody in sunshine. Ember couldn’t see much of him in library shadow, only the glance of a single dark-lantern’s rays across slender build, petite height, dark hair.

And that laughter. Beckoning.

He glared. “No one’s allowed in here after hours. No one’s allowed in here without my permission. And—and you’re stealing that!” Book-walls spiraled upward around them, a supportive tower sketched in silken grey, gilt-lettered spines, curious hollow spaces. He and Chance had been filling in those gaps as best they could for the past three years; the late King Brassen hadn’t cared much for reading. Every volume, and not only those in the more valuable back room, was his friend. “Put it _back_.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. A commission, you see.” Light as chatter across a ballroom, casual as a rowing-party on the Sweetwater; but this river glinted with robbery and danger. The book-thief had quite sensibly worn dark grey and green, fitted and shadowy under a hood; he wasn’t tall, and his voice sounded cheerful and irritatingly blithe, caught red-handed. Literature-handed. In the narrative. “Did you say you were the King’s librarian? The King’s librarian is—” He stopped.

“Yes,” Ember agreed, “you were saying?” and shifted weight, ever so slightly.

He and Chance did, in some ways, look alike—the tilt of eyes, that straight Lyon nose, the expressions on his half-brother’s face that Ember had glimpsed on his own in a mirror—but most people never saw that. Never saw past the height, the shoulders, and his skin, midway between King Brassen’s aged tawny gold and the shimmering onyx of the Araly dancer who’d caught the lion’s eye. Chance had the late Queen’s fairness and got sunburnt under rainclouds. Ember had waited in his chambers with aloe creams for years, after Brassen ordered his only legitimate son to keep up on all-day hunts.

His book-thief must be new to Lyonheart. Any person in the city’s market would’ve known. The King’s librarian was the King’s bastard older brother, and at a glance they did not resemble each other.

Ember tended to get stares in that market less because of his coloring specifically—though that was a part of it; traders came by from the Southern Continent often enough to be unusual but not singularly so—but because he loomed. Couldn’t help it. Their father’s muscles.

“The King’s librarian is someone who spends his days indoors with books, I was going to say.” Pale eyes flickered over him. Up and down. Lingering, Ember realized with a shock of thrilled outrage, on his shoulders, waist, below his waist. He couldn’t tell what color those eyes were under the hood, only that they danced in a ray of lamplight. “You, on the other hand, should be rescuing virgins and valiantly slaying monsters in perilous forests. Have you seen your arms, lately?”

That tone was either genuinely honest admiration or outrageous flattery; Ember choked on unexpected absurd laughter. “I’m preventing a crime, aren’t I? Put it back, please.”

“Do you know how difficult it was to break in here? You’ve actually got decent wards up. How’d you manage that?”

“Valiant monster-slayer secrets. Learned in a perilous forest. How did you—stop that!” His thief had begun inching toward the rear—and open, he noticed—window. Lyonheart sprawled sleepily outside, dreaming with the restlessness of an island city-state in the hours before dawn. Morning marketers and broadsheet-vendors and violet-sellers would be stirring soon, bakeries opening, the drifting scents of strong tea and hot pies and fish-hauls and the clatter of early voices like a hundred melodies at once. Beyond darkened windows the sea lapped at shore, purring, wine-hued.

A few streets down from the palace, etched in black-on-night along the harbor’s curve, he could see the shabby old spires of the dilapidated Magicians’ College next to the taller newer symmetry of the University. He thought, as he always thought, _home_ ; and memories of creaky voices and dusty spellbooks and patched-up robes warmed his bones.

“Sorry. I thought you said I could go. I’m certain I heard that.”

His thief was having fun. Teasing. That laughter again. Ember narrowed eyes at him, stalked closer, and demanded, “How’d you get in?”

“Through the window. And I’d quite like to get out again, so if you’d not mind, I’m trying to borrow a book from your library, which I believe you’ve opened to all visitors—”

“Borrow implies that you’ll bring it back. Visitors come in during open hours.” He put a hand on the book in question; his thief had been attempting to tuck it into a bag. An antique volume. One of Flint’s histories of magic in Lyonheart, volume one, all the way back to the Crossing and the First Kings. The copy itself was fairly old, but they had older; it did not have a jeweled cover, though it did have real gold leaf in illuminated capitals. “Visitors check in at the front gate. So I know who’s in the house.”

“You enjoy knowing who’s here?” His book-thief had dark hair, black or brown; he’d tied it up, but stray waves were escaping. “You enjoy knowing who…gets to come…into your library?”

Young, Ember thought; not a boy, but youthful enough to be reckless, to dare consequences, to twirl on a tightrope. To laugh.

Despite the book between them, they were close enough to touch. Close enough for heat in the night.

And that night crackled: awake and conscious of every sense in a way he was not sure he remembered ever having been. The closest might’ve been the time Chance had come down with summer fever and nearly died and _not_ died, opening exhausted eyes and finally seeing him; this was not that emotion but nearly so, a kind of stunned relieved recognition, a quickening to life, the leap of joy in his veins.

His book-thief’s lips had parted, soundless, gazing up at him. He’d had to tip that head back to do so; and they stood framed by fourteenth-century political discourses for a moment, caught out of time.

The young man went up on tiptoes, sudden and sweet, and kissed him. A thief’s kiss, a bandit’s kiss, dazzling as sunrise and as audacious.

The young man tasted like cherries, and possessed bones as light as a bird’s, no weight at all against him, and had soft bouncy hair; Ember knew this because apparently his hands had slid into it, pushing back that hood. The book was trapped between them. It held heartbeats and pressed edges into his chest.

The young man drew back, laughed briefly—wondering, as if surprised—and kissed him again, deeper this time, tongue sneaking out to explore, to lick, to drink him in. Ember made a noise, or one of them did, and pulled him closer and met playfulness with strength; his thief moaned a little and actually leaned into him, eyes closing.

Warmth flooded through the library, and sang in his blood, in that welcoming response where their bodies met.

Chilly air rampaged in. Emptiness. No more lips on his. Ember blinked, panted, fought for equilibrium. One hand on the bookshelf.

“I’m really very sorry,” his thief said from the window, perched on the sill like the nightingale he might’ve been, lightweight and song-voiced, “that was—that was—well, you’re not anything I expected. From the King’s librarian. Good night, my valiant monster-slayer.”

He vanished. Out of sight. Doubtless with a rope, a ladder, a daring swing across kitchen-gardens and courtyards. Ember hadn’t recovered enough to go after him. The palace—Lyon House to everyone besides the most particular; it’d been Brassen’s great-grandfather who’d called it a palace, and it wore the name rather sheepishly—opened onto the public square; that laughter’d be long gone.

He stared at the night. He caught himself lifting a hand to his lips; and then he laughed a little, too, astonished.

He locked up the library, and checked the rest of the windows just in case, and went back to his room.

He’d moved into the main house after the state funeral three years ago, after they’d put King Brassen to rest at sea and dedicated the newest monument in the royal Memorial Garden. He’d wanted to come earlier—Chance had been looking pale and overwhelmed under the weight of the Crown—but they’d reasoned that there’d be bigger fights ahead. No need to stir up emotions by inviting the half-foreign bastard older brother into the palace before their father’d been given due ceremony. No need to remind the Court just how little Chance resembled their father—and how much Ember did, in build and shape if not coloring. That valiant build.

Chance and Giulia occupied the connecting King’s and Queen’s suites at the far end of the second floor. They’d be in bed, hopefully asleep, possibly trying for the heir who hadn’t arrived yet; no candlelight showed, though. Ember balanced his own candle and key and got into his door. It creaked at him reproachfully. He winced.

He’d taken over two of the connecting rooms down the hall, rooms that’d once belonged to ambassadors and magician-advisors and later to their father’s favored mistresses. He’d had blood-red draperies and ceiling-mirrors removed and sold or stored in the attic, and had redecorated, mostly with books. Chance had bought him a gorgeous Friesian cartographer’s world map; it painted stories of faraway lands over the fireplace.

He took a deep breath, and held out a hand to cold logs. He pictured fire, in his head; he imagined fire, became for a moment the essence of fire, incandescent, curling, consuming, giving back, in scarlet and gold, orange and sunlight. He held it in his palm, and thought very gently about small fires, cozy domestic fires, fires leaping comfortably contained in a hearth.

His logs obligingly whooshed to life.

Ember tossed an appreciative salute at them, and kicked off shoes and curled up in a heap of pillows on the floor by heat-flushed stone. He only had one not terribly friendly chair; they’d prioritized the ability to pay palace staff over nonessential refurnishing. Chance had ruthlessly mined even the sapphire-studded collars of Brassen’s hunting-dogs to settle inherited debts.

As ever, magic left him mildly weary, and euphoric, and triumphant. Like the moment after fireworks, he’d said to his brother once. The moment when the world lights up and you can do anything, and then it fizzles out and you’re left in the dark again. But you know you did it. Right then.

As far as he knew no one else in Lyonheart could do magic. And even he couldn’t do much. Small spells. Short-range.

Even that was more than four out of five of the senior magicians at the fading College could manage.

Everyone understood as much. Magic hadn’t been powerful in Lyonheart for centuries, not since the great sorcerers of old had picked up their people on the brink of the sea’s rushing flood and had flung them all here to safe haven. That’d used up all but the barest drops of power, the story went, and College-trained magicians got a kind of good-humored patient respect because of it, but these days no one expected them to do more than light a candle.

Emberly Lyon, half-Araly son of the late King and a dancer who’d spent three nights in that king’s bed, could spark dead logs to roaring radiance with a thought.

He looked into the fire, and breathed in and out. Let tensions fade, let his body calm, let the world wash over him. Pillows and blankets and old stone. Chance and Giulia down the hall, safe and secure. Hushed night-velvet quiet in the house, disturbed only by the prowling of a cat or two, a rustle at the tip of much-reinforced wards.

He’d ended up at the Magicians’ out of sheer coincidence. His mother hadn’t wanted a child; Brassen Lyon had at that time no heir, and had eagerly claimed this proof that he could sire sons, but hadn’t quite known what to do with a crying infant. The solution’d been a wet-nurse, and then packing him off to the downtrodden but respectable weatherbeaten towers streets away, where nobody’d suggest the royal bastard might be raised to rule, but neither would they accuse his father of complete and utter neglect.

At age fifteen, when Chance had been eleven, he’d discovered that he could hide them both from being seen, when Brassen had been searching for increasingly cruel ways to toughen up the only royal heir. If he wanted it badly enough, if he thought it desperately enough—

Those footsteps had paused to check the ramshackle library, seen only dust-bunnies and moribund shelves, and gone on, grumbling about boys who were a useless waste of time.

Chance had turned to him with huge hazel eyes, unafraid, awed into silence. Ember had always remembered that: that Chance had never been afraid. Not of him.

He would protect his brother with every breath. With every secret of his unexplained and carefully guarded magic. From threats to the kingdom, to life and limb, to painstakingly gathered books and crumbs of information for their library.

He couldn’t help imagining his thief’s reaction. He wished he could picture the young man’s face. He wished he could grab slim shoulders and—

Calm. Right. He wasn’t _that_ good at this.

He shut his eyes and felt firelight across his face and felt his awareness seep out and spread beyond the castle, into the city, into the quivers and sighs and crevices of the night. A few bright flares nagged at his attention; he knew them, because they were his book-wards.

He counted. Exactly right: the number he knew he’d let visitors borrow, plus one. They all responded promptly when touched with invisible fingertips.

Ember opened both eyes, smirked at his fireplace—flames swirled giddily in reply—and tucked himself into blankets and pillows, too lazy and tired to move. He had a bed, or at least a heap of antique wood and worn feathers that went by the name. It was in the other room and far away from the fire.

Too tired to move, after that, yes; but satisfied. He yawned. Tucked a foot back under blankets. The blankets were thick and heavy and rather surprisingly made to bundle up someone his size; he’d found them in a storeroom and given them a decent wash himself, borrowing a tub—they couldn’t afford to pay the laundresses and laundrymen extra wages—and they’d dried large and fluffy.

Twenty-four hours, more or less, it’d be. The rare books in the back room were all set to that. Snapping back to home shelves. Sense of place and belonging imbued into covers. The ordinary books in the front rooms, the ones he and Chance had declared would be available to everyone, would pop back after roughly three weeks. It’d taken some work on his part, but they’d been putting work into the library; he didn’t want to lose any pieces of stories, science, knowledge. Home.

Home, he thought, cheek pillowed on one hand, drowsing. His little book-thief hadn’t known him on sight. His little book-thief wasn’t from Lyonheart. And also hadn’t been afraid.

He wanted to know more. He wanted to find out more. He was good at solving problems, at being practical, at helping Chance fix the kingdom. He could solve this mystery. He would get his book back.

He could find out who the young man had been, and why he’d tasted like cherries, and if he liked cherry tarts, and if he liked hands catching his elegant wrists and holding them deliciously captive in bed.

He managed to fall asleep as dawn sidled in, knowing he’d have to be awake for breakfast in three hours. He dreamed of bookshelves at his back, and laughter, and a kiss that left sweetness on his mouth like the juices of ripe red fruit, bursting over his tongue.

 


	2. Chapter 2

In the morning awareness arrived sneakily and insistently as a palace cat. Ember had for as long as he could recall possessed the trick of waking himself when he needed to, which did not mean that he did not swear under his breath and scrub hands across scratchy eyes. He stuck his head into the frigid water-basin in his bathing-room, shook wet hair out of his face, banged a shoulder on the doorway—the bathing-room hadn’t been designed for someone of his proportions—and threw on a clean shirt and went to have breakfast with Chance and Giulia, in the upstairs morning parlor with the new blue-and-white wallpaper, across which swallows swooped mid-flight. They’d replaced rather shockingly obscene murals, and served one room’s worth of notice to visitors that the Crown was working toward being able to restore itself.

The King waved a butter-knife his direction as he came in. “What would you think about providing free bread and cheese in the morning to all our grammar-school children?”

“I think,” Ember said, lifting antique silver trays, uncovering poached eggs, smoked salmon, sliced ham, “that I can think about this better after I’ve had food. Which of course proves your argument. Can we afford it?” He found his own plate—they’d never bothered with ceremony at breakfast and couldn’t pay a footman if they’d wanted to—and collected fried potatoes. “Don’t say it’ll come out of your personal allowance; we dipped into that to fund the school in the first place.”

“We can afford it. We finally had a good harvest from the estate.” Chance pointed the knife at him. “Why do you look tired?”

“This year we did. What about next year? Or the year after that?” He supported his brother’s social reform programs out of both familial loyalty and general principle, but Chance frequently needed someone to play devil’s advocate; he consumed a forkful of eggs to underscore the point, and ignored the second question.

“You let me worry about that.” As Queen Consort—the title’d been a placating compromise—Giulia Luna was not technically in the line of succession, but then according to convention anyone less than nobility ought not to’ve been Queen at all. She possessed a delicate pointed chin, pale topaz-blue eyes, and cornsilk hair; that deceptively fragile prettiness plus her dowry’d had half the men—and more than a few women—in the city writing bad sonnets in her honor. She’d grown up the only daughter of the richest banking house in three kingdoms; and she certainly knew to the penny, Ember reflected, the daily international prices for wool and saffron and the tea in his cup. “I’ve got plans.”

Chance had needed to marry money; the Crown had been teetering on the brink of outright ruin after Brassen Lyon’s extravagant reign. He and Ember had come up with a list of candidates. Had rocked the world, or at least Court—which amounted to the same thing—by declaring that royal rank was not a prerequisite. Had been honest about the circumstances, in ballrooms, at picnics.

The banker’s daughter and the young king hadn’t fallen in love at immediate first sight. But it hadn’t taken long, either. Maybe one of those picnics. Two.

Nearly three years after that first meeting, Chance looked at his wife as if she’d hung every last incandescent star in the sky. She smiled at him the same way.

“Jewel,” Chance said, picking up another piece of toast, “did you have something specific in mind?”

“I did. There’s the farmer in North Karry whose new mechanical harvester has gone into mass production, I told you about that one, it’s showing excellent returns, and there’s that young man here in the Street of Artisans who believes he’s figured out something to do with steam power and valves, and he’s suggesting it’ll be useful for deep mining and production and possibly even transportation. Papa thinks it’s ridiculous, mind you, but I think he’s being overly conservative and I’d like to at least have a look.” Giulia nibbled a fairy-light piece of golden crumpet and pineapple jam, and licked a fingertip. “We won’t be dependent on the harvests for money, at any rate. Emberly, you _do_ look tired. Why is that?”

“Up late reading,” Ember said promptly. They wouldn’t think this was a lie.

“Are you sure?” Chance tilted an eyebrow at him. Ember had never been able to raise only one, and found this excessively annoying, which his little brother knew. “I have the strangest feeling that you’re lying to me. Your King. Your only _sibling_. I’m wounded.”

“You’ll live,” Ember told him heartlessly, and poured tea. No one needed to hear about book-thieves with tempting soft hair. Certainly no one needed to hear about kisses, stolen as well, glinting as rubies in the night. He found himself oddly breathless. The tea provided a shield. “Have you heard anything more from the Old Goats?”

The Old Goats was Chance’s nickname—and now all three of theirs—for the noisiest of the disaffected conservative members of their father’s court, the ones who’d hated the frivolous fashionable barely-of-age heir and his newfangled reforms. Most of them had left Court in a huff once it became clear that Chance intended to replace any inept ministers with young bright minds, putting University-trained recent graduates and farmers’ daughters shoulder to shoulder with lords who could count ancestors back to the First Crossing. From the safety of country estates, they grumbled about fracturing power and loss of true nobility and calls for investigation on the basis that Chance couldn’t _possibly_ be a true-born son of the heroically-muscled and square-jawed King Brassen, but they were mostly harmless.

Mostly. A few, like the elderly Lord Vane, were quieter, and watchful, and consequently more unnerving to Ember’s mind.

Lord Vane had tried to talk to him once at a party, shortly after Chance’s coronation. Ember had thought of snakes slithering across old dry book-pages, whispers of cracked vellum, ink and knowledge and danger. Quillance Vane had seen two kings come and go. Had murmured in that mummified-linen voice, gazing at Chance’s banked-fire hair under tapestried light: _you look more like your father than he does, you know._

Ember had told Chance about that one later that evening, upstairs; his half-brother’d tossed the royal coronet onto his writing-desk and sighed. Ember, despite being the bastard son, was four and a half years older, stood taller, and carried their father’s memory in shoulders, chest, stubborn chin; Chance had rather unexpectedly come out with his mother’s haphazard wildflower prettiness, autumn auburn and slender cream and woodsy eyes. There’d be more murmurs. More suggestions that perhaps the boy who more unmistakably bore Brassen Lyon’s stamp should step into the king’s shoes. They’d known as much even then.

They’d been right, of course.

He wondered what color his book-thief’s eyes were. Hard to tell in the gleam of a dark-lantern. Pale, he thought; they’d caught the light and held it. But blue, green, grey? He didn’t know. He wanted to learn.

Annoyed with himself, he poked at eggs on his plate. The spell ought to be bringing his book back soon. Within the day.

Neither of them remembered Queen Silvia well. She hadn’t left them in childbirth, but had never been strong afterward, gradually growing thinner and weaker and quieter, until one day she simply faded away. The day in question had been the day after Chance’s fourth birthday; Ember wondered sometimes whether she’d been waiting for that, for the day after, to not cause more pain, or to see her son one year older. He’d been allowed to visit for Chance’s party: their father’d liked proof of his own virility running around, as if to say _see? the reason we only have one heir obviously lies with the Queen…_

The Queen had not ever been strong, one of his tutors had told him in passing. Kind, but timid and frail, a sparrow-girl from a minor Northern city-state who’d brought a princess’s dowry to feed Brassen’s expansive hunts and feasts and festival rule. She’d liked to read. She’d liked to sing, though Ember did not recall her singing much, and Chance only a little, in bedside glimpses. He’d told Chance everything he’d found out through books and letters and remembrances, sorting through scraps of a life, once he’d been old enough to dive into research for the sake of giving his brother some memories.

Ember’s own mother, in all her onyx-hued wild beauty, remained undeniably alive and well. She ran the best brothel in the city, these days, and did so with dazzling flair and a knack for turning the golden coins King Brassen had left her into multiple if scandalous fortunes. She did not like being reminded that she had a fully grown son, and had showed precisely no interest throughout his childhood; Chalice Inke had not expected nor wanted to become a mother, and Ember did not blame her for that. She did acknowledge his existence, and would find time for an hour of pleasantries and palace gossip, the way she would with one of her many friends, if he dropped by with a bouquet of flowers.

All these facts combined made his mother a tricky subject for any number of reasons, and the three of them tended to tiptoe around the topic.

“I haven’t, lately,” Chance said, and Ember yanked his brain back to present politics and away from memorial stones and their contrast with heavy golden brocade, “which of course is even more worrying, though at the moment we may have another problem. A serenity problem.”

“Sounds like a philosophical conundrum.” He leaned over and stole a sugar-dusted beignet from his brother’s plate.

Chance did the eyebrow-raise at him again. Ember made a _you should be eating better anyway_ face right back. His little brother sighed and waved a letter at him. “It’s a proper name, you malevolent warlock. I was going to eat that. Diabolical.”

“You have two more. Eat those. A name?”

“Serenity Blakely, otherwise known as Serenissimus Bellini, otherwise known as Cadence Bell, and Count Victor Swansea, and also apparently Lady Lydia Velvet…”

“Really?”

“Vasily says so.” Chace paused to reread, checking his own translation of royal-stationery Khaganate characters. Watching, Ember felt the familiar sting of that long-held anger: how could their father, how could anyone, have called his brother worthless and useless and foolish for preferring linguistic complexities to drunken wrestling-matches and hunting for sport…

Chance had always had terrible aim. Ember let out a breath, let useless resentment at a dead man fade, and stole a second beignet and ate it, secure in the knowledge that any flung objection would hit thin air. “And how did Vasily discover this? And why do we need to know? You said it was a problem.”

“I did, it might be, and I’m fairly certain he found out after a night which ended in his bedroom and a missing chain of office.” Chance and the sixth son of the ruling Khagan had never met, but kept up a lively correspondence born out of mutual linguistic curiosity, annoyance at the general sea-ringed sequestration of Lyonheart, and Prince Vasily’s textbook on Khaganate-to-Angla translation, about which thirteen-year-old Chance had had very pointed questions. Letters went back and forth on diplomatic courier ships and trading-ships as fast as possible; they were both perfectly aware of political tightropes and surveillance and watchful eyes, and traded information like chess-pieces bartered between friends. “He doesn’t say as much outright, but he more or less does. He’s impressed and cranky about it. About the theft, not the sex. Well, possibly that too. Anyway he’s here, Vasily says.”

Ember, who’d had years of practice keeping up with his brother’s pronouns, said, “Serenity Blakely whatever?” and then knew, absolutely _knew_ , and felt powdered sugar turn to guilty lead in his stomach.

“Yes. He calls himself the, ah, third-best thief in the world—” Chance paused, expecting a comment; Ember would, but was too busy trying to kick some sense into his desires retroactively. “—and Vasily says, from certain, um, comments that were made…during the night…he was planning to come here. Lyonheart. Of course this letter’s six weeks old. Have you heard of anything missing? Noticed anything?”

A book. Kisses. His heart. He had a plan to get at least one of those back. His brother, his King, would not need to be bothered. “No…”

“It’s not as if we’ve got anything tangible for him to take.” Chance waved a hand: one crumbling house, one rebuilt library, funds poured right back into public works, sanitation, education, harbor upkeep. “He can drop by and have a beignet if he wants, Mistress Ashmore’s amazing at—oh, come on, seriously? Get your own!”

“We do, though.” Giulia set down her teacup with a considering clink. Breakfast sunshine striped her porcelain hair with gold. “Symbolic value. The crown itself. The Queen’s jewels. The royal seal. A skilled forger could have a copy done. Any of those would weaken us even further, and if he’s willing to seduce a prince and steal his chain of office—and dispose of it discreetly, such that no one’s tracked the sale—”

“I imagine Vasily was willing to be seduced. I might be. I’m interested.”

“Not without me present and approving you aren’t,” Giulia reminded her husband, sweetly and thoroughly in charge; he caught and kissed her fingertips. “And in this particular case I think not. You’d accidentally tell him where to find the keys to the treasury, love. Emberly, is there anything you can do? Any way to find out what an infamous thief might be after in Lyonheart, or to find him before he succeeds?”

Ember, completely and utterly sure he already had found the thief in question, and sure that Serenity Blakely had a merry wind-chime accent and a mouth that tasted of cherries, managed, “I…can…I don’t know, I’m, ah, good at locator-spells, at least the ones I’ve tried, but I’d need to—to know something about him, I think…”

Deliciousness. Flirtation. That moment of unguarded happiness, as if purely thrilled by disrupted expectations. Slender muscles aligned with his own.

Oh sea and sky, he thought. And despite everything a sudden quick skip leapt under his breastbone: he had a reason to find his little thief again. A request from the King. A glimmer of magic, or anticipation, or some newborn nameless other emotion.

He finished belatedly, “I’ll walk down to the Magicians’ after breakfast and see what Master Heron knows about more advanced searching-spells. Some of the older forms don’t work for me; I don’t know why. But we’ll look.”

“Well, let me know if you find anything.” Chance poured more tea, stared at his cup for a second, added extra sugar in silent commentary on the day ahead. “I’d like to know if we in fact have the third-best thief in the world running around. I’d like to get those plans for a proper constabulary into some sort of shape so that we’d _know_ if we had a thief running around. But then oversight’s a problem, and objectivity’s a problem, and money’s of course a problem…will you be out all day?”

“I’ll come back this afternoon and open up the library.” They tried to keep those gates invitingly wide. Chance believed that an informed citizenry was essential for good rule, as well as transparency regarding past crown expenditures, land grants, and tax levies. As well as novel-reading, and history-reading, and flights of imagination. Opening up new worlds. Shelves for thieves with kissable lips to plunder and ravish. To be ravished up against. Repeatedly. “Um. Would you. Do you, ah, need me to be here? For the Weavers Guild meeting?”

“No, I’ve got your notes from the historical charters of operation. We’re going to have some discussion about unpaid import duties and percentages. I expect they’ll grumble and make insulting comments about my parentage and I’ll order new tapestries for the grand hall and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle as far as future taxes go.” Lyon House technically still possessed a grand reception hall. Like an aging courtesan, it wore cheap brass trinkets and cracked foundations uneasily over what had once been strong bones. Even before the mass desertion of unpaid palace staff during the final years of Brassen’s reign, the place hadn’t been cleaned properly between reeling tipsy revels, night upon night.

Chance would have to store those new material representations of tapestried compromise someplace where moths wouldn’t nibble them. Ember decidedly did _not_ wonder how soft they’d be, and whether, while he might be interrogating a captive book-plunderer, they’d frame Serenity Blakely’s pale mysterious eyes. “If you’re sure. I could glare at people for you.”

“As much as I love watching you play angry royal secretary with Guild representatives in your paws, and I absolutely do, I need my librarian and my library keeping that promise.” And my magician, said Chance’s eyes. Your magic. What only you can do. Let me know if you find anything. “Could you pick up the _Mirror_ for me? I’d love to know how I’m overturning the world this week.”

Ember laughed. Giulia had cut out last week’s cartoon and set it neatly on the fireplace mantel: the two royal winged lions of Lyonheart looking on in astonishment as an extra-young Chance shook a tiny detailed city like a transparent baby’s rattle. The caption’d read _O my dear he says it will be better in the end!_ and _Yes but are we to be shaken to pieces first?_

The writers of the _Mirror of Lyonheart_ , despite this, had evident affection for the new king, and Chance appreciated them right back. They weren’t above skewering his youth and disregard for tradition in favor of progress, but they reserved the worst mockery for more myopic and short-sighted members of Court who objected to Chance’s concern for women, children, and domestic workers simply because that wasn’t the way things were done. The _Mirror_ did tend to leave Lord Vane alone, no doubt out of instinctive self-preservation. No one wanted to find out what a wealthy elderly spider might do when satirized.

“Your humble librarian can handle this particular quest,” he promised, and left the table to Chance’s eye-roll and mutter of, “Humble librarians don’t steal my last beignet!”

He went out the side gate, grinning, into morning light.

Lyonheart in sunshine glowed like a tiny jewel, swung like a miniature kaleidoscope, twirled like rustling skirts and shoes at a ball. Cobblestones echoed with steps present and past; twisty streets meandered up low green hills toward farms and country estates along the gold-limned banks of the Sweetwater as it spilled down to the sea. Most shops and bakeries—including Chance’s current favorite, Ashmore’s—had opened by now; the harbor wasn’t terribly full, given their distance from the rest of the world, but one or two Nezhdarian ships bobbed low and sleek upon tides on their way to the Northern Continent, and that Khaganate diplomatic courier was preparing to set sail, spreading billowing white wings, carrying Chance’s letters and affection. The market-square stretched out to enfold him as he walked: bursts of color and sound, flowers, fresh fish, cabbages and carrots, voices beckoning passersby to come and look and taste and try, the best or the freshest or the newest…

Boys and girls waved broadsheets, the _Mirror_ and the theoretically more objective _City Journal_ , at him as he passed. Today wasn’t a school-day, though one of the girls had a small pocket-novel with her; he recognized it as one of his library, felt the brush of book-warding like a familiar cat’s-purr, and tossed her a penny in approval. She waved.

Most people in the market knew him. Difficult not to. The shoulders, the complexion, the royal connection. They waved or saluted or called out a good morning as he passed, and moved out of his way to make space; Ember waved back, tried to take up as little space as possible in turn, stopped to inspect a secondhand book vendor’s wares, took himself over to flirt weightlessly with the eternally ageless Miss Rosie over her plums, and wandered off with a tattered edition of Merlow’s _Doctor Fastbauch and the Sea-Demon_ plus a bag of three plums and six apricots that nested contentedly into Chance’s copy of the _Mirror_.

Above the world the scent of sea-spray, the cry of wild gulls, the crash and curl of oceans, hung like a welcome. A banner. An unfurling. Horizons. Home.

His mother would be summoning guests into her parlor, choosing the day’s patrons with a practiced evaluative eye. Chalice Inke kept a fabulously exclusive client list, rigorously maintained in that cream and black marble house in the newer-moneyed square near embassies and banking-parlors. Her girls and boys smiled and leaned from Ink House’s windows and blew kisses to rich merchants and ship-captains and diplomats, dressed in suggestions of taffeta and corset-ribbons. Chalice herself would be holding court downstairs.

He’d bring her roses if he had time on the way back. White ones, to match the décor. His mother appreciated aesthetic considerations.

If he had time. He needed to find a thief. He needed to perform his duties as royal librarian. He spared a wish that Chance’s proposed constabulary could leap into existence and do at least one of those jobs for him. He wasn’t sure which. He wanted both.

He wanted both for himself.

He passed under the shadows of the University, following the circle of the harbor, listening to waves tease rocks below. The University’d been established by their grandfather mainly as a place to send younger sons of the nobility who needed some discipline, and a few hand-picked scholarship students when he felt like a random act of benevolence; Periwinkle Lyon might’ve had other goals, more scholarships, but had unexpectedly fallen from a horse, struck his head, and died without waking. He’d never met either of his grandsons, nor seen Brassen’s increasingly reckless self-indulgence.

Chance had distant future plans for the University. Ember had attempted to picture the Court’s reaction upon being told that Crown endowments would be contingent upon open admissions and increased places for the children of merchants, bakers, clock-makers, sharing classes and tutors with young lords and ladies, anyone who wanted to learn. He couldn’t quite visualize the reaction. Probably underestimating.

Serenity Blakely had an aristocratic accent. But not from Lyonheart. Verezian? Meroan? Not Alban, or not likely. Something more liquid, limpid, fluid as light trembling over cerulean waves.

Thinking about voices, thinking about laughter, mildly irritated at his own level of interest—the boy was a thief, after all—and following the questions on his tongue like the ghost of a kiss, he took the ramshackle steps down to the Magicians’ College at the far point of the harbor’s half-moon. His feet knew uneven stone. His hand knew the worn-out ease of that wooden door. He’d spent years sleeping in the moonlit airy student rooms on the left wing of the second floor, gazing out over the bay.

He came inside, and shut the door carefully—heard the click of the lock, felt the snap of the College’s wards around him—and caught his breath, as ever upon first entering: wanting to laugh, wanting to cry at the sheer rightness of the world.

Chance, who’d visited the College with him once or twice, didn’t know. No one knew. He couldn’t find words to explain.

The heart of magic in the city. The first landing-point after the Crossing. Where so many magicians had spent their magic and their lives to save their people. The College whispered to his soul.

Every inhale felt like renewal. Like the shedding of skins, of expectations, of weight, even the desired kind. Like knowing where he ought to be.

Here he was not Brassen Lyon’s first son, or the royal bastard, or the King’s older brother, or Chance’s protector and book-loving librarian. He was all of those, of course, and he would be again in a moment, but for now, simply for now…

Emberly Lyon tucked a bag of fruit and a book and a newspaper under his arm, held out both hands, and thought of summer: of wild peaches, sweet and ripe and bursting with juice; of sunshine like slow glass, and white lace, and sweat drying over a man’s skin, and the caress of fingertips in sticky heat, and the deep poignant joy of magic flooded out from his fingertips and turned the grey spare bones of the hall to peach-fuzz memories and tall garden grass and sunkissed caresses, radiant.

He wondered whether Serenity Blakely liked peaches.

Summer wobbled and collapsed into autumn russet and pumpkin gold and crumbling archways. A chip had gone missing from the marble under his feet. The glass in college windows was clouded.

“We have missed you,” said a voice from the back, dry and sarcastic and kind as old wine, “though some of us might not appreciate being reminded of our youth, you know…you may wish to keep that one contained; our wards aren’t what they once were, and you’ll have half the city wondering whether Iris has discovered a sudden lust for young men.”

Ember instantly retorted, “Sudden? Haven’t you heard her stories about the boating-parties when she was young?” and ran across the atrium to throw arms around Master Heron, who patted his shoulder and put up with this exuberance for a second or two. “I know it’s been a few weeks, I’m sorry, I meant to—”

“Fire-sprite.” Heron patted him on the shoulder again, absentminded affection. Ember’s heart splintered: the boy he’d once been and still was, encouraged by lined blue eyes and true scholarly passion, collided with twenty years of growing up and learning to protect Chance and their small determined family, seeing now wayward white hair, stooped shoulders, fingers that could sketch a spell but not perform it. “You have a life. We know you haven’t forgotten us.”

“We certainly know you’ve been busy.” Lady Iris—the magicians traditionally renounced last names and titles for fear of favoritism, but Lady Iris had always unquestionably been a Lady—emerged from the back of the atrium as well, silver hair straight and shining as a sculpted waterfall. As the only member of the College with any lingering power, she’d been the one to publicly claim responsibility for the royal library’s book-wards and the palace’s invisible protections. They’d agreed back when Ember’d been sixteen that this was necessary; nobody knew how Brassen would use an illegitimate magician-child, and none of them wanted to find out.

He understood that this minor deception had kept him safe. He also understood that Lady Iris did not mind the world thinking she had enough power for those spells. He’d seen her struggle to light a fire against the sea-damp in her rooms.

The Lady drew them all into the main workroom with a sweep of plain heavy robes; even Master Heron got caught up in her presence, with the patient smile of a man who’d known as much for years. Ember offered him an apricot.

“So.” Iris smiled at him: motherly, or one upright old-fashioned elegant aspect of it. Ember didn’t have much basis for comparison. “What can the College do for our King?”

“In a minute.” Ember sat down, hoped delicate decades-old furniture would survive, held out a plum. “Can’t I say hello first? Do you have students? Could they use anything?”

The Lady regarded the dark purple bloom of an offering, weighing the choice: accept a gift which she’d not purchase herself, or deny a small pleasure. She took the plum. “Three, at the moment. None with any potential whatsoever. We had a fourth, but—but he was required at home.” The line of her lips suggested more to this story, but if she didn’t wish to share, she wouldn’t. “All noble byblows, naturally. Your father’s doing.”

After Brassen’d used the College as a fostering-ground for his first and illegitimate son, other members of the Court had followed suit, recognizing a convenient compromise between complete rejection and proper upbringing. Ember’d met six of the other children, all younger than himself, none with any magical skill. Most of them left upon coming of age, not tied to a fading legend of power. One or two of them stayed, drawn by loyalty, cooking and cleaning for the descendants of mythology.

“They’re good children,” Master Heron murmured, fingers steepled, thin and feathery as his namesake in the stone ring of the workroom. The chairs formed a dedicated assortment of decades and fabrics, brought in from spare rooms, sales, family donations. The quiet stone slab at the center remained the same, though. It held the simplest of implements: silver bowl, a knife or two, a mirror, water in a crystal glass. The strongest of the magicians did not need incense or theatricality or supposedly power-enhancing and addictive drugs; the sorrow of Master Tourmaline swam before all their eyes for a moment.

Emberly Lyon, uncomfortably aware that he might be in fact the strongest magician alive, shifted weight in his chair. He needed nothing more than himself.

Most days. When his magic behaved itself. When he knew what he was doing.

“No one says they aren’t good children.” The Lady’s intonation took this statement and shrugged at it. The five remaining magicians in Lyonheart lived up under the eaves like sparrows in the College these days, fretful and weary by turns over the loss of power. The round-faced and interchangeable Gillie sisters relentlessly practiced every ritual they knew, every supplication to old discarded sea-gods they could think of, hoping against hope that one day a spell would blossom into life. Master Tourmaline no longer left his rooms at all. “They don’t belong at the Magicians’ College.”

“I belonged here,” Ember pointed out patiently. “And you didn’t know that. When you took me in.”

“Yes.” Her eyes softened: ice into springtime ponds, a hint of the beauty she had worn and still wore like a cloak of pearls. “We won’t turn anyone away if they come to us.”

“Nor,” Master Heron said wryly, “their parents’ money. Emberly, are you in trouble? Is the King?”

“Not more than usual. Well—” He paused, thought of slim flexible weight in his arms, sighed. “I need to know if there’s a good way to find someone. A thief.”

Both magicians looked at each other. Then at him.

“He stole a book,” Ember added.

“A terrible crime indeed.”

“Dreadful.”

“I’m serious!”

“We’re only teasing you, fire-sprite.” Master Heron picked up another apricot, thoughtfully. Ember had brought them for precisely this reason, and nudged them closer. “Books are valuable. Particularly so as you and the King use them, as symbols of recovery…perhaps Godwyn’s approach to discovery? With that emphasis on the true natures of things?”

“That won’t work if he doesn’t know the thief in question.” The Lady’s eyebrows tugged together, silver pondering above that inkwell gaze. “Laws of affinity? You might find the book, but if it’s been delivered or sold…I’m assuming you’d rather locate the person responsible, as you’ve got wards on the text, haven’t you, Emberly?”

“Er,” Ember said, “yes, I have,” and tried to avoid childhood memories of afternoons on his feet in this same workroom, summoning light over and over for the approval of that cool-voiced instruction. He did not need to feel like a twelve-year-old schoolboy at the moment.

He unfortunately did feel like one. With a first love. A beautiful young man he wanted to find. He buried this accurate assessment under discussion of his book-wards. “You checked them over when I did them, at least the first few…”

“I assume you’ve carried on correctly.” Iris banished any notion of failed teaching with the wave of a hand. “Where’s your book at the moment?”

Ember shut eyes, concentrated, poked at small twinkling tendrils of himself. Flint’s history of magic, volume one, sat up and shook itself like a willing dog; it’d been about to pop back anyway, rather quicker than he’d thought. That spell had an outside boundary of a day, but the books sometimes developed minds of their own. He wondered occasionally whether extended application of magic had somehow imbued them with a sort of limited awareness, such that they’d flee unpleasant borrowers. He did not want to witness Lady Iris’s expression if he voiced this theory.

He couldn’t tell where it was, but he could ask it to return now, please; he waited, and felt the slip and slide of it, landing neatly in place and filling the gap on that shelf. Emptiness answered. Satisfaction. Job well done.

He resurfaced with the vague impression that he ought to have ruffled pages and a gilt-edged spine; he blinked and let human sensations sidle in. “It’s back.”

“That’s one problem solved. Now. How might you go about finding someone in a city? What do you know about this person?”

Tempting tiny stature. Daring leaps from windows. A kiss that’d tasted of surprise, eagerly so, diving into a new adventure. “I know his name. I know…I’ve met him. I think.” After all, he had no proof that the third-best thief in the world and his little book-thief were the same.

Only his belief. Only his hope that they were.

Because that would help him solve the theft. Because that would make resolution far tidier.

Because he wanted to know the color of those eyes.

“If you’ve met him you’ll have your impressions to draw on.” Heron leaned forward, a silhouette of a man in a sunbeam, etched with the fleeting grief of the knowledge that he could not do so himself. The last magicians of the College had come to terms with this long ago, Ember knew, but that did not mean reminders couldn’t wound. “That should make this simple enough. If you need water—”

“I can get that,” Ember said hastily, and got up and came back with the glass, not bothering with the bowl. He wasn’t planning on visual demonstrations. Even the seawater was simply an anchor: a kiss of home to his fingertips. “Looking for affinity, or for difference, did you say?”

“That depends on your impressions.” Iris smoothed robes with the gesture of someone needing to move hands, to find distractions. “If you thought he felt wrong, or disruptive…or if you sensed something that fit here, something you did like about him, perhaps…”

She had to be merely suggesting possibilities. The lure of a charming personality. The tease of his own earlier magic and summer-laced daydreams. Had to be only that. No way for even the Lady to know.

Ember, not for the first time, was glad to not have Chance’s fairer skin. Less visible blushing. Right.

“Right,” he agreed, and stuck fingertips into tranquil seawater, and stretched out perceptions into Lyonheart.

Almost immediately he knew he’d made a mistake.

Cacophonous sound flooded in: chattering voices, marketplace bartering, children playing. Men and women making love in all possible configurations. Sailors shouting to each other from the harbor, amid the arch and play of waves. Up at Lyon House, Chance saying calmly to a weaver _according to this fifteenth-century agreement with the Crown you should be paying twice what you are in import duties and you know I’ve been settling my father’s debts so by all means let’s consider again some unpaid commissions for bed-hangings and how we might resolve this,_ and the tickle of that sea-breeze on his brother’s neck through an open window. A sudden burst of fruit, red and delicious, and then a flare of shock or astonishment or pain, someone’s pain, and then old sun-warmed cobblestones that diverted his attention, flat and well-used and ever-present…

The world spun, grew drunken on itself, lurched inside his head.

Focus. Silly. A child’s error. Too quick. He knew better.

He took a breath. Let it go. Seawater lapped at his hand: real, tangible, the world of their island.

Serenity, he thought. And he smiled.

He drew up the taste of cherries, and the bounciness of soft hair, out of memory. He gathered the glorious ripple of that accent, and the lightness of that body against his, and the boldness of words tossed his way; he wove in his own reaction, honest as he had to be here, feeling anew that giddy swell of unanticipated wanting in his body, in his heart. He held it all and formed it into a shape, a goal, a landing-point; and went out looking.

That glaring pain swung back and stunned him. It landed hard and sharp, a knife into flesh. He jerked away automatically, gasping. Crystal hit stone and shattered; seawater splashed like blood, wet on his sleeve. He swore under his breath, or someone did.

Get away, he thought, escape, that arm’s a liability, this isn’t right, nothing about this is right, never mind that, run—

When he opened his eyes he had one hand clutching his shoulder. He wasn’t wounded. He did need a second to remember how to make lungs work.

“What happened?” Master Heron had a hand under his elbow. Ember blinked again and realized that he’d knocked over the spindly chair. One leg’d come off. “Are you hurt?”

“No…I don’t think so…” He stayed sitting on the stone floor, though. Easier than being upright, plus he’d be less likely to destroy furnishings. “I don’t know what that was.”

“Offensive magic? Protections against scrying?” Iris had come around to his other side. She rested a hand over crystal shards; her hand shook, but the crystal gathered itself gradually up. Priorities, Ember thought, shaky himself; but that wasn’t fair. They couldn’t very well leave broken glass around the workroom. “I didn’t think anyone in Lyonheart could do that these days.”

“It might not be from Lyonheart. He isn’t.” Ember touched his arm again, resisted the impulse to check for a stab-wound. He knew he wasn’t bleeding. “Could there be magicians anywhere else who—”

The other possibility descended like a hurricane. Left him airless and horrified and groping for sounds.

Oblivious to this internal tempest, the Lady frowned at him. “No other magicians exist, Emberly.” Her tone evoked childhood tales and scolding corrections: magic belongs to Lyonheart, magic came with Lyonheart, the rescue of our people took all that strength, don’t blaspheme. “You know that.”

“Never mind that—” He plunged a hand into puddled seawater over stone. Grounded himself. Held on. “That’s not it, I think he’s hurt, I think I felt—wait, let me try again—”

His little book-thief _had_ been hurt. That’d been the flash of pain. The cry that throbbed in his head even now.

He knew he was right about this. Knew it the way he knew he could kindle a fire, find his books, open a lock: with the simple desire that fire be lit, books be found, locks be opened. Knew it the way his bones and blood and breath had sung at a kiss.

Serenity had been injured. At the second Ember’d reached for him.

He couldn’t focus. He tried. Glimpses hovered and vanished, ephemeral, falling like spider-silk through shocked clumsy hands. He flung himself wider, thinner, searching. He lost himself in minds, in coruscating sparks that ebbed and flowed. He couldn’t feel his own heartbeat. He—

He woke to the abrupt pink brightness of pain across his cheek. He touched his face; shook his head free of cobwebs, found Iris’s hand hovering. “Thanks. I’m back, I think…”

“Even I can’t pull you out if you need it.” She cupped his cheek with expert fingers, brittle and old and strong as First Crossing embroidery. “We can’t afford to lose you. And not simply because you’re the only one, dear boy.”

“I’m not sure I am,” Ember said dazedly, and then wondered why he’d said so. Some evanescent half-understood presence? Some potential he’d reached in that last spiraling crescendo? Unimportant. At least less important. Right now. “I need to—I have to find him. I have to—”

“If he’s hurt he’ll seek out a physician.” Master Heron offered him a plum. Ember bit into richness and juice, and felt a bit better. “He’s clever enough to slip past your library wards, so I doubt he’ll let himself perish.”

“I don’t know.” He ached everywhere. Reminders, if he’d needed them, that he was not half the magician his ancestors had been. Not half of what they needed. The new dawn of magic in Lyonheart. And he couldn’t save a single young man.

A young man who’d made him laugh. Who was a thief and might not seek out help if wounded. Who was a stranger to Lyonheart and might not know where to find the street of physicians and midwives.

Who’d given him a challenge: him, Ember the librarian, not the old king’s son or the new king’s brother.

He finished off the plum. Pictured that moment: the library, the back room, the flicker of previous unknown delight. A book between them, and the way dark hair had come loose from its ties during a kiss.

The books danced through his thoughts. Kept presenting themselves. The back room. The rarer volumes. His writing-desk by the window. The taste of cherries. A hint of pain.

He opened both eyes. He felt reborn: exhilarated, astonished, aware of his own reality and his wet hip where seawater’d spread and the pulse in his temple.

It’d been easy. It’d been the place he felt most himself. It had meant Serenity.

He breathed, “He’s in the library—” and stumbled to exhausted feet, remembered to grab his book and Chance’s paper only because Master Heron held them out, and ran.

The morning had given way to noonday sun; market-folk had retired or put up canopies for shade. Some of them turned to watch the King’s brother in bewilderment; Ember ran across harborside paths and cobbled squares and wished futilely to make himself small enough to duck through crowds. His heart pounded. His feet skidded on wet pavement, on spilled violets from a seller’s cart; he threw himself forward and kept going.

He did not know why he cared so much, except that he did, he did care, he did not want anyone hurt, and especially not someone who knew how to laugh, how to make Ember himself laugh—someone who shouldn’t be hurt—

A few people were hanging about near the main gate to the library wing: students, scholars, middle-aged respectable citizens. Ember did not have time to open up the building, and dove into the old servants’ entrance, bolted down the hall, sprinted through the front rooms and wide-eyed book-shelves, and knocked the door to the back section open with a hand-wave.

Serenity Blakely, curled up like a kitten in Ember’s chair, behind Ember’s writing-desk, lifted his head—black-brown curls fell into his face the way they had the first time, the night before, before a kiss—and said, rather weakly but with flawless amusement, “Fancy meeting you here.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our heroes employ magic, talk about some things, and scandalize bookshelves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably about halfway done. Maybe. I don't know. We'll see.
> 
> I have an idea about a sequel, though. *laughs*

Serenity had green eyes.

Pale green. Watered jade and celadon labyrinths, complex and intricate and twisting. Tempting visitors into the maze, where they’d get lost.

Those remarkable eyes also held pain. This comprehension, visible and unguarded, stabbed Ember in the heart: his little book-thief could throw a flippant cliché of a bad opera line his way while bleeding.

He came around to the desk, around the side of the desk, somewhere between apprehension and the impulse to smile back at the line and a sense that he’d wandered into a dream. Those twin mazes. Carved in winding mossy agate. “I’m the librarian. I’m always here.” Not precisely true, but the sort of thing one said in a dream. “How badly are you hurt?”

And the eyes got rather surprised. “How’d you know?”

“Magic.” Ember set down book and paper, held out a hand: enticing a kitten, coaxing a water-nymph. A slim flyaway one, built of sea-foam and night. “And you’re covered in blood. Can I help?”

“Ah, of course. Magic.” Serenity sat up more. His face was whiter than it should be; his left arm moved stiffly, and he hissed. Scarlet had turned the blue of his loose shirt rusty. Across his shoulder, down his chest. He was plainly only upright with the aid of Ember’s chair, which had taken his side and was playing support.  “And you are indeed always here, aren’t you…my valiant hero. You do fit the role. Tossing coins to little girls, visiting elderly mages, all that.”

“I’m not _your_ anything—” Ember froze, big hands hovering outstretched, abruptly aware of the words hanging in the air. A shameless account of his own morning. An _of course_ , and Serenity’s utter lack of shock. And—

He didn’t know what to shout about first. He ended up waving hands around like a demented fish, realized all over again his own size and bulk versus Serenity’s sparrow-bones and the blood along that sleeve, and sank down on the edge of his desk. “You—you—oh, just hold still.”

He wasn’t terribly good at healing spells. Old scrolls suggested ways of sourcing power from sea, from land, from rocks and trees. Ember had never been able to draw power, to pull strength, from anyplace other than himself; he could see people glowing like bonfires, could sense the world moving and breathing and being lapped by ocean, but he couldn’t figure out how to take that into himself and redirect it. Might be beyond his reach; magic might be returning, but that didn’t make him an equal of legends.

None of that mattered. Serenity, who’d kissed him and made him laugh, was bleeding.

He could do something about that.

And _then_ he could shout.

He said, “This might hurt, sorry,” and put a hand on Serenity’s arm. Serenity stayed still as a cat caught by curiosity and delight, watching, wide-eyed.

The stab-wound was a bad one. Not fatal, not that high, but it’d been intended to be. Ember drifted through the fleeting impression like a salt-sweet hallucination, blurred and diaphanous. Serenity’d been watching him in the market, leaning on a bakery’s wall, lazy and fascinated and idly considering him in ways that made Ember blush while being flattered. He wasn’t sure he could do that—or that, or that _other_ thing—in _that_ position, even if those green eyes were indeed so flexible; but some other emotion shone tantalizingly under daydream lust and kitten-interest, something that Serenity did not have a name for but beckoned and kissed back and was kind.

Serenity had heard the quiet step in time—Ember did not know how—and had ducked or dodged or—something, some motion Ember couldn’t quite see that overlapped for an instant with sunlit cobblestones and plum purple. The knife’d hit his shoulder, deep, but not his heart.

Pain crackled anew: impact, stunned comprehension, red spilling free. Ember gasped as it sliced into his flesh; Serenity gasped too, drenched in it a second time, trembling. In memory the knife withdrew, bewildered, seeing only stone and dazzling dust-motes, and melted back into the crowd.

Ember wanted to apologize again, but had no time; the only way he knew to fix real injury involved taking it, taking it into himself, reshaping his body, the only one he knew from the inside. He had to feel what’d happened to do so. He’d done it for Chance once or twice. That summer fever. A broken arm.

He let the pain flow, up from where his hand rested on Serenity’s forearm, into himself; and then he told it to be right, silently. To make the wrongness depart. To become anew the way everything ought to be.

He hurt everywhere, opening his eyes—not from injury but from the lurching aftermath of drained power—but he wasn’t going to show that to his thief. He managed, over the thumping heartbeat in his ears, “Better?”

Serenity shivered as if resurfacing, put his other hand to his shoulder, discovered new skin under torn silk. His eyes had gone even wider, rain-sweet amid library walls and book-spines. “Yes. I feel—it feels—”

“Ah,” Ember said, “right, that happens,” and tried not to be envious. Serenity wore the expression of someone floating in the blissful cessation of pain: astounded and euphoric and quivering with an infusion of magic. “Aside from that, are you feeling better?”

“Rather incredible, I think. Are you hurt, though?” Serenity bounced up out of the chair but didn’t go anywhere, standing in front of him, fitting exuberantly between his legs. Ember’d stayed sitting on his desk; his book-thief either had no sense of personal space or else considered space irrelevant given stolen kisses and healed injuries, and reached out to rest a hand on his shoulder. “You look as though it hurt.”

Ember put on his best hiding-weariness-from-family face, wondered when he’d mentally sorted green eyes into that category and _why_ , and retorted, “I’m not hurt. Magic, like I—wait, are you sure you’re fine? Absolutely?”

“Yes, I think so—”

“Good. Then you can tell me why you were following me.” One hand around that delicate wrist. Hard enough that Serenity caught breath, off-balance, trapped in place before him. Other hand up: not that he could summon more than a spark right now, but only he knew that. “And who wants to kill you. And also how you broke in here. And—and what you wanted with my book!”

“So you’ve healed me just so you can leave bruises—”

“This isn’t a game! I’m not flirting with you!”

“Aren’t you?” Serenity twisted that captive wrist: less attempting escape, more proving a point. Ember’s body, traitor that it was, noticed the way that slenderness felt under his hands. The way that light body fit between his thighs. The way that glance found humor in the situation—everything backwards, a theft and a rescue and desire and not even a decent introduction—and cheerfully mocked him for it, unrelentingly bold. “I don’t mind bruises in a good cause, perhaps being bent over your desk, and it seems as if _you_ would—”

“I,” Ember said levelly, “am the King’s librarian, and the King’s older brother, and I can do magic. And _you_ are a threat to the King.” He wanted his glare to be more convincing than it was. He kept getting distracted. By acrobat’s muscles. By the memory of the softness of that hair. The library doors remained closed. People no doubt waiting outside. They could wait.

Serenity scowled at him. Did not bother trying to pull away. “I’m a thief, not an assassin. It was a _book_. One book. And anyway you owe me.”

“I _what_.”

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.” Ember got the impression that he wanted to cross both arms and couldn’t, with one wrist imprisoned. One eyebrow tilted at him instead. Ember grumbled internally. His thief could do that too. Like Chance. Like everyone except himself, evidently. “I am good at what I do. He—my client—had no reason to try to kill me. I completed that commission. Unless you, my librarian hero, did something to un-complete it. I haven’t offended anyone else in Lyonheart that I know of. So it is clearly your fault I ended up nearly bleeding to death in an alley behind a marketplace on an island rock. And therefore you owe me.”

Ember utterly failed to think of a response to this effrontery, opened his mouth, closed it, tried again a few times. “ _I_ owe _you_.”

“You took my book back, didn’t you? My life’s in danger because of you.”

“That—that—I saved your life! Just now!”

“So now aren’t you responsible for me?” Big eyes. Limpid. Vulnerable: in his hands, so literally, with a tear in that silky shirt and fair skin and tumbling hair, standing before him…

He only noticed his grip’d slackened when Serenity finally managed to cross arms and take a step back. “And I’d appreciate protection. And passage on a ship headed back to Alba. Decent accommodations, if you would.”

This time Ember caught up faster, shoved him up against the nearest bookshelf, pinned those glorious wrists over his head, and demanded, “You’re not from Alba.” Not originally, not with that accent.

“Serenity Blakely, son of Alistair Blakely, the twelfth Duke of Kenton—which is in Alba, thank you—and Marina Colonna, Countess Bellini, of Verezia. Where I grew up. For the most part. In and out.” Serenity, unbothered by their respective positions, gave him an up-and-down inspection that would’ve been not out of place in an Alban ballroom: a beautiful wealthy boy considering dance partners, with the weight of two titles at his back. And then he grinned. And the world leapt to attention, ready to waltz. “At your service.”

“The twelfth Duke of Kenton doesn’t have an heir. All girls. Famous for it.” One or two of them’d hoped to marry Chance. “And you’re a thief.”

“I never said legitimate son, did I? Perhaps you ought to listen better; is it a hero trait, not hearing past the muscles? It’s hardly my fault my father’s country doesn’t acknowledge my parentage. And I’m not simply any thief. I trained under Adam Bell, and I’m better than he was at my age. I’m the third-best in the—”

“In the world, yes.” He leaned closer. Their lips nearly met. Enough for mingled breath, quickened heartbeats. The scents of dry paper and old leather bindings. The drum of adrenaline like thunder through veins. The distant crash and roll of waves outside, pounding the shore. “We’ve been warned. You seduce princes. And steal from them. Who paid you?”

“Ah, you’ve heard the Lydia Velvet story, did you like the bit about the lacy undergarments—”

Ember kissed him. Waves roared. Sunlight flooded the room: open windows at his back, glass brimming over with golden heat. His own magic, the dwindling headache, the fairness of now-healed aristocratic skin revealed under that torn shirt, Serenity’s rippling accent. Spun into a dizzying whirlwind.

The world became bewildering and glorious, his ordinary life ripped apart and re-sewn with watercolor jade eyes and lace and his body over Serenity’s. Serenity Blakely made a small sound, not of dismay nor even of surprise but of welcome; and arched into him as if loving every moment spent crushed into a bookshelf by a larger man’s height and weight and desire.

He still tasted like cherries, faintly, and also like sunshine and seaspray from outside, and a bit like copper, as if he’d bitten his lip during the attack. Ember murmured something wordless and touched his cheek. Serenity left both hands in place above his own head as if he’d forgotten he could move, and started to speak and stopped, eyes enormous and luminous and inarguably hopeful, so Ember kissed him again.

Even better. Delicious. Decadent. Deliberate. Discovering each other. The way Serenity liked being teased, and squirmed satisfactorily at purposefully too-light kisses and nibbles and licks. The way Ember wanted to simultaneously hold him down and make that quicksilver lightness yield and melt into honesty, and also to hold him, to protect him, to keep him safe as lingering blood stained his shirt and the chair, drying.

This bit of petite flesh and bone had stolen a book and made Ember smile. Had strolled into Lyonheart and changed the world.

Ember, kissing him, did not want Serenity on a ship for Alba. He did not know what they might do, what they could do, otherwise; but he knew he did not want that.

He said into one delicate elf-ear, under loose dark curls, “You said I was responsible for you…”

“Mmm, yes…would you like to be extremely responsible and take care of my needs, on your desk, or right here, against the books, they’d hardly mind…”

“And then what? Why do you taste like—”

“Vastly expensive flavored lip balm. From my mother’s cosmetics supplier. Only the best. And then I kiss you and slip away in the night, leaving you to pine for me, naturally. Do that again, with your hand—”

“This?” He had fingers under that billowing shirt. “You’d want me to pine for you? How’re you feeling?”

“Like champagne. What did you do to me?” Serenity paused: disheveled, flushed, gorgeous. A siren ashore, intoxicated and intoxicating, otherworldly and real as the mark of Ember’s mouth on his throat. “Not that I’m not enjoying myself, but I feel more…more…than usual. Magic?”

“Yes. And no. You weren’t surprised. Why not?” He rubbed his thumb along smooth skin: just above the line of Serenity’s belt, which whispered leather suggestions at him. “It’s only the aftermath. Healing. Enhanced sensitivity. You’re not going to do anything you wouldn’t normally do.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t normally sleep with mighty-thewed barbarian librarians on a second encounter. Not that I wouldn’t, but it’s never come up.” Serenity glanced down between their bodies. Did the eyebrow-raise again. “Though it rather definitively has now. Did you think you were the only person with magic?”

_“What?”_

“We’re stopping? Oh…fine, then. Will you kiss me again if I answer?”

“What did you mean, I’m not the only person?”

“Exactly that.” Serenity was obviously trying to look annoyed, and equally obviously failing, thanks to arousal and puzzlement; he had a face that wore emotion openly, written in dark eyebrows, wide eyes, happy lips. His hair was standing up: woodsprite loops and wayward curls. Ember’d done that. “You really don’t know? I thought—you run a school for magicians!”

“They can’t do magic!”

“Then why is it a school for—”

Ember had to kiss him again at this point simply to interrupt. When they surfaced, he grumbled, “They mostly can’t do magic. One or two can. Tell me.” He had a hand around both those wrists, getting them intimately acquainted with the back spine of William Childe’s _Collected Legends and Folktales_. Serenity beamed at him, at this turn of events.

“Most people can’t do what you can do. I mean the book-wards, the protections, whatever you did to heal me. I don’t know anyone else who can do that. Or who—never mind.”

“What?”

“Who would’ve. I did say you were a hero. Ah…well, illusionists, herbalists, hedge-witches, that sort of thing, they exist…in most places, anyway…you must know the legend. It’s your legend.”

“Remind me.” He thought that Serenity Blakely had not known many heroes. He thought that Serenity had not been saved, or healed, or rescued, before. He thought that those labyrinthine eyes had not expected it now. And he heard unsaid words: a beautiful illegitimate child of a countess and a foreign lord, for some unknown reason sent to his father’s country, where he’d been disavowed and left to learn what he could on the streets. From an infamous bandit. Collected legends, indeed. He stroked a thumbtip over vulnerable skin, tracing the inside of a fine-boned wrist, and added, “Please.”

This had the unanticipated effect of leaving Serenity momentarily speechless. Ember promptly committed this instant to memory. “Unless you’d rather I stop asking nicely.”

“That’s hardly inducement to tell you right away, is it?”

“Is it?” Ember said, and they were smiling at each other, impossibly wonderful in every mismatched dare and reply. “If I’m responsible for you I need to know what you know. So I can do that. Be responsible. For you.”

“I only said that to distract you so you’d let me go.”

“But you said it.” To prove his point, he slid his hand down from tempting wrists. Pushed fabric aside; sapphire folds fell off a shoulder. He set his hand over the place where not even a scar marked moonspun skin: fingers and palm over life and vitality. “And you can help me. Please.”

Serenity drew a breath, released it. His eyes found Ember’s, framed by afternoon sunshine and time-worn books. “I don’t know much. It’s the story. Children know it. The day the great flood came for the people of the old islands, the people with their sorcerers and magicians, and the magicians scooped everyone up and flew away to safety, but they took the best and the strongest magic with them…”

He’d heard Lyonheart’s version. He’d never heard someone else’s. “But there’s still magic.”

“The people who didn’t live in the islands. The people who hadn’t sent their brightest and most gifted to study there. Nobody’s very powerful, it’s all minor stuff, but most of the Verezian Court have pet diviners, and I knew a girl who could call a sudden rainshower while she picked your pocket, back in Alba.” Serenity’s eyebrows drew together, quizzical, compassionate. “They don’t tell you that? Your magicians? You’re not alone.”

He wasn’t alone. He didn’t have to be.

The words rose like dawn and crept over the horizon, pouring light. Other magicians. Other traditions. Other people who’d know what sang in his bones, his heart. Who knew the coruscating crescendo and the inexorable lure of power, not for a purpose but simply to be, to make roses bloom and repair knife-wounds because not to do so would be unthinkable, would be less than himself…

Serenity said, “Even I can, a bit, I’m mostly only magic-sensitive but I’m a good mimic, it’s how I got past your wards?” in a voice that worried about his librarian’s present state of mind. “If I can feel someone’s magic, and I generally can if they’ve got any worth feeling, I can…sort of…convince it that it knows me? Camouflage, I think you’d call it? I can’t do spells, though. Not like you.”

“Can you show me? Can you—I don’t know, let me see what you did, when you got in here, how you—” Spells. Book-wards. Chance’s library. Their library. Their family.

The sunshine got colder. Scolding him for this loss of judgment. Overeager. Tempted.

Seduced. By Serenity. Who enchanted princes for a living.

He took a step back. “You knew what I’d want to hear.”

“I honestly thought you knew. Not about me, but the rest of it.” Serenity dropped arms, stretched, tested his shoulder. “Are you through with me, then? Am I on my own, or will you at least let me borrow space behind your protections until there’s a ship through for Alba?” He looked more tired, suddenly: small and fierce and rumpled by rough handling, and younger behind that invisible cloak of recklessness. “I’m not a threat to you. I fulfilled the commission I was paid for, I’ve nearly been killed over it, and I’d like to get myself off this rock of yours before the next knife.”

“We’re not—you’re not—” He did not know where that sentence had headed, having set sail. “I don’t want you to be murdered in our market square.”

“Ah, but _is’t not the fate of all pleasant-faced ruffians to meet true steel_?” Serenity quoted at him, wry and sharp and passionate as that centuries-ago playwright’s words. “Thank you for the healing-spell, and I’ll absolve you of further care.”

Ember got over sheer bibliophilic excitement in record time, and retorted, “ _Would not even a ghost seek a night’s repose?_ ”, pointedly switching plays to _The Ghost of Ravenwood Hall_ , which of course hadn’t involved a ghost at all but only a convoluted return-from-the-dead inheritance plot. The returning traveler’d come back from shipwreck and amnesia and long wanderings and scheming relatives to finally find his home. “You know Kit Hathaway?”

“Not personally, seeing as he’s been dead for three hundred years.” Serenity took one step toward the window, but only one. “I should’ve known you’d like the improbable romances.”

“You had to pick _Lord Arden’s Downfall_ , with the _six different revenge plots_ and candles made from _blood_ —”

“What, you’re not impressed by overly theatrical banquets featuring one’s enemies’ heads as centerpieces?”

“Impressed might not be the word. Wait. Please. I mean—are you going out the window? Don’t. Just.” He ran a hand through his hair, pleaded, “Wait.”

“Are you planning to help me?”

The complete incongruity of the entire afternoon—the crumbling Magicians’ College, breakfast with Chance, the blow of pain, the pain of healing, the exaltation in a kiss, and now this question—landed ringed around by sunbeams and absurd hilarity. Exhaustion. Hysteria. No previous royal librarian’d had to deal with this.

“Hmm,” Serenity said, coming back. “Try not to fall off your desk; you’ll land on me and I can’t carry you, much less move, at that point. I really do think you’re not all right.”

“And you’re here. Who paid you?”

“It seems I am. Here. And this is your chair, and it’s a very comforting one, I should know. I don’t run around giving out client names. That’s a brilliant way to die quickly.”

“This one already thinks you double-crossed him.” He might’ve been able to breathe again, except that illogical fractured laughter’d turned into astonishingly all-encompassing arousal. Serenity fussing over him, making him sit down, checking the steadiness of his gaze, had awakened fantasies he’d never known he even had.

“So he does. Is there anything you need me to do? Right now?”

“Answering my questions would be nice. Or opening up the library. Or telling them all to go home, there’s a book-thief loose in my office…”

“Now I’m definitely concerned,” Serenity muttered, though in that accent words came out more musical than frustrated. “You actually care about opening the library?”

“We promised. We’d share what we have.” This was important. “We always do.”

“ _Such_ a hero. Stay put.”

“Where are you—”

Serenity vanished through the doors to the front room. In the direction of the public gate. Ember regarded the doors with bafflement. They offered wooden shrugs in return.

After a minute or two he began wondering whether this was all a ruse, whether his thief had simply stepped out the gate and disappeared like smoke. It’d make sense. Stupid to think otherwise. Serenity’d avoided giving any real information about the theft, and didn’t care about him, and didn’t love Lyonheart—

Wintergreen eyes reappeared around the doorframe. “Have you got a copy of Mavelli’s _Treatise on the Behavior of Princes_? For research purposes, he says, he’s a scholar from the University, his name’s Rosamond Orris.”

“Um…” Ember automatically got up and poked at back-room bookshelves. Found a slim hundred-year-old copy. Guiltily squashed previous imaginings. “Here. He’s got twenty-four hours.”

“Thank you, hero.” Serenity vanished again, presumably to deal with research-focused scholars. Ember considered the arts of mimicry and self-confidence, and their uses.

Serenity came back in with the smug assurance of a cat, pocket-edition sized and insouciantly compelling. “I told them the King’s librarian would be occupied with important matters this afternoon, and I put a thoroughly polite and responsible-looking University fourth-year in charge for the day. I may’ve hinted that there’d be some sort of apprentice librarian position available at some future point in the King’s household. I only said perhaps; it’s not my fault he believed me.”

Of course the boy’d believed him. Serenity Blakely, while likely barely past University age himself and possessing no official credentials and recovering from a knife-fight, could turn that smile and that charm on anyone, and they’d fall all over themselves to trust him. At his feet. Honored by the privilege.

And Ember himself was no exception. He silently kicked his brain for pointing this out, and let Serenity’s promises of palace employment go for now. He _could_ use an assistant, in any case. Unpaid to start. Meals with the King and a dilapidated but inhabitable palace room. “We need to talk.”

Not kiss. Not push up against bookshelves until those toes barely touched the floor and interrogate with bare hands. Talk. Finding answers.

“Agreed.” They’d both taken steps closer; they met in the center of the room, in a ring of stories and tales and light pooling through aged glass onto hushed floors. Serenity had to tip that head back, fearless and lovely, to look him in the eye; Ember’s soul woke up anew and did cartwheels of glee and exasperation and strange captivated tenderness, a newfound need to use strength and size as a shield.

“Do you have someplace private we can go?” Serenity’s eyes were darker around the edges of those irises, more pine than rock-moss. Lyrical as poetry, as a question, as a caress. “I realize this sounds as if I am propositioning you, and in fact I am, I’m thoroughly in favor of every proposition we can think of, but we need to know what we need from each other first.”

“A bargain.”

“And in good faith I’ll give you something. Here.” He held out a hand; Ember, against the protests of common sense—the boy was a criminal, a seducer, and yet he’d also played librarian when Ember’d fretted over closed doors—took it.

The world dissolved into rainbows. Streaks of fluid color, ocean-blue and sun-gold and stone-pale and ruby-inked illuminated manuscript capitals. Iridescent plumes of power. Scents of leather and vellum and caramel sugar. They wreathed the library, Ember’s hands, the palace; he knew he’d find them everyplace he’d put wards, and if he could see the Magicians’ College he thought it’d feel and taste and sing with sea salt, old wild rocks, the history of magic in a gull’s cry.

“This’s how I feel magic.” Serenity curled fingers more closely around his; Ember squeezed back. “I can’t handle it, shape it, the way you can. But I told you I’m a good copyist. Watch—” He made some imperceptible adjustment, an invisible shift in stance, an honest interest in the eddies and tides of the magic itself, and it came over and wrapped itself around him like a friendly blanket. “Your wards thought I was you.”

“Oh,” Ember said, lightheaded, alive. “Oh.”

“You can have that first look for free.” Serenity smiled at him; rainbows dwindled and returned to ordinary extraordinary library walls, shelves, architecture. “If you’d like to examine me further…in more depth, shall we say…after we talk, of course. You did say.”

Emberly Lyon, King’s librarian and magician, holding hands with a beautiful green-eyed thief and wanting to know more, _wanting_ , said, “I’ve got rooms in the palace, if you’d like to compare our respective…propositions,” and listened to Serenity laugh, free and weightless and uninjured and mysterious and real, with their fingers joined.

 


End file.
